Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough

What it is and how it came about

James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, first published in 1890 and later expanded to twelve volumes, collected rituals and beliefs from all over the world. Frazer read them as stages in a story of progress: magic is a primitive, mistaken science, which gives way to religion and finally to real science. The book was hugely popular, and its picture of "primitive" thought was widely shared.

Around 1930 Wittgenstein told his friend Maurice Drury that he had always wanted to read Frazer. They borrowed the first volume from the Cambridge Union library and read it aloud together, though they got only a little way. In 1931 Wittgenstein wrote a series of remarks on it in his manuscript volume. A second set, rough pencil notes on loose sheets, was written years later, in Rush Rhees's judgement not earlier than 1936 and probably after 1948. Rhees published both in the journal Synthese in 1967. English translations followed in 1979 and in Philosophical Occasions (1993). In 2018 HAU Books published a German-English edition, translated by Stephan Palmié, with essays by anthropologists, under the title The Mythology in Our Language. It is freely available online.

What it says

Wittgenstein's objection is simple and devastating. Frazer treats rituals as opinions, as hypotheses about cause and effect that happen to be false. But a ritual is not a mistaken theory. The same person who, apparently to kill an enemy, pierces an image of him, builds his hut of real wood and cuts his arrows with skill, not in effigy. If he really held a false belief about causes, it would show up in his practical life too. It does not.

Think of what we do ourselves. Someone kisses the photograph of a person they love. Nobody thinks they believe the kiss will reach the person in the picture. Someone hits the ground with a stick in anger. These acts express something; they aim at nothing beyond themselves. Wittgenstein suggests that many rituals are like this, and that Frazer, so keen to explain, cannot see it.

Welche Enge des seelischen Lebens bei Frazer!

How narrow Frazer's inner life is!

Bemerkungen über Frazers Golden Bough

He even turns the charge of primitiveness around: Frazer, he says, is further from understanding a spiritual matter than most of the "savages" he describes. Against Frazer's historical hypotheses Wittgenstein sets another method: arranging the facts so that we see their connections, a perspicuous representation (übersichtliche Darstellung). The same idea returns in the Philosophical Investigations, §122. The later notes add a further thought: what strikes us as deep and sinister in a fire festival is not explained by its origin, but by something in ourselves.

How to read it

This is the shortest text in this list and one of the most readable. You can finish it in an evening. It helps to read a chapter of Frazer alongside it, for instance the opening on the priest-king of Nemi, to see what Wittgenstein is reacting to. The open-access HAU edition has the German and English side by side, plus essays from anthropology. Bear in mind that these are working notes: sometimes abrupt, sometimes repetitive, never systematic.

Why it matters

These few pages have had a long afterlife, especially outside philosophy. They are read in anthropology and religious studies as a critique of intellectualist explanations of ritual, and they belong to the background of Peter Winch's debates on understanding other cultures. In France Jacques Bouveresse wrote an important essay on them. They also show, very concretely, the shift towards the later Wittgenstein: practices and forms of life instead of hidden theories.

The reading is not uncontested. Critics such as Frank Cioffi argued that Wittgenstein was unfair to Frazer and blurred empirical and philosophical questions. Others think he romanticises ritual and underplays the fact that people often do expect their rites to work. A recent article in the Nordic Wittgenstein Review shows the debate is very much alive.

Verdict

Read this if you are interested in religion, ritual or anthropology, or if you want a short, vivid example of how the later Wittgenstein thinks. It is a good second or third Wittgenstein text. Do not expect a theory of religion: what you get is a set of sharp objections and a different way of looking.